Journal Impact Factor: Do the Numerator and Denominator Need Correction?

Xue-Li Liu, Shuang-Shuang Gai and Jing Zhou

PLOS ONE, 2016, vol. 11, issue 3, 1-15

Abstract: To correct the incongruence of document types between the numerator and denominator in the traditional impact factor (IF), we make a corresponding adjustment to its formula and present five corrective IFs: IFTotal/Total, IFTotal/AREL, IFAR/AR, IFAREL/AR, and IFAREL/AREL. Based on a survey of researchers in the fields of ophthalmology and mathematics, we obtained the real impact ranking of sample journals in the minds of peer experts. The correlations between various IFs and questionnaire score were analyzed to verify their journal evaluation effects. The results show that it is scientific and reasonable to use five corrective IFs for journal evaluation for both ophthalmology and mathematics. For ophthalmology, the journal evaluation effects of the five corrective IFs are superior than those of traditional IF: the corrective effect of IFAR/AR is the best, IFAREL/AR is better than IFTotal/Total, followed by IFTotal/AREL, and IFAREL/AREL. For mathematics, the journal evaluation effect of traditional IF is superior than those of the five corrective IFs: the corrective effect of IFTotal/Total is best, IFAREL/AR is better than IFTotal/AREL and IFAREL/AREL, and the corrective effect of IFAR/AR is the worst. In conclusion, not all disciplinary journal IF need correction. The results in the current paper show that to correct the IF of ophthalmologic journals may be valuable, but it seems to be meaningless for mathematic journals.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0151414 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 51414&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0151414

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0151414

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().